Who holds the key?
Sources include ownership, actual access, heat, schedules, safety, labor, and the testimony of people who use the room. The owner is an affected person but not the sole authority.
Dialogic Pragmatism · institutional form
The Schattendorf Tables
A decision form that keeps evidence, affected persons, dissent, responsibility, consequence, review, and the end of authority in one public record.
- 01
Question
State the decision in language narrow enough to be answered and broad enough to expose its consequences.
- 02
Sources
Separate direct evidence, reported speech, inference, memory, and imaginative reconstruction.
- 03
Established / disputed / missing
Do not convert absence into certainty or disagreement into a single summary.
- 04
Affected persons
Name who will live with the decision, including people who are not present in the room.
- 05
Answer / correction / refusal
Preserve the right to alter the record, contest its use, remain silent, or decline reconciliation.
- 06
Decision threshold
State what level of support, evidence, or urgency authorizes action.
- 07
Named bearer
Identify the person or office responsible for carrying out the decision.
- 08
Material consequence
Record effects on bodies, safety, food, wages, shelter, routes, custody, and work.
- 09
Review point
Fix a time, event, or evidentiary change that requires reconsideration.
- 10
Stopping condition
State when extraordinary authority ends and what cannot be done in its name.
Three scales
The same form changes with the institution.
The family, the trial record, and the state do not have equal jurisdiction. The Table preserves that distinction.
What did the proceeding establish?
Legal judgment, newspaper reporting, later reconstruction, and public memory remain related but unequal. Missing testimony remains missing.
Who may act in an emergency?
A named bearer receives a bounded task, record, review point, and stopping condition. Protection is not a blank transfer of sovereignty.
The unowned center
The Table must be portable without becoming ownerless.
Copies, custody, routes, and practical capacities are distributed so that no single office, arrest, confiscation, or death can erase the record. Yet each action still has a named bearer.